Video Game / The Spirit Engine 2

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The Spirit Engine 2 is an In-Name-Only sequel to The Spirit Engine. The story begins when the three heroes (chosen from a possible cast of nine) rescue a young girl named Isabelle and her brother Elai from assasins of a cult which seemingly seeks to kill her and her brother. Before killing Elai, one claims that some great mission is almost over. Although they rescue Isabelle, nobody has any clue why they had any interest in the children. Knowing her village is too vulnerable to leave her there, they escort her to a nearby military base in hopes of leaving her under their protection. However, they are soon plunged into the heart of an even deeper, more sinister plot, with many apparent enemies and few friends. The plot inevitably links back to the children they saved, but not before growing in scale beyond their wildest dreams.

Although the plot retains no similarities or links to the first Spirit Engine, the game features a greatly-enhanced version of the first game's active-time battle system which leads to difficult, strategic battles. Like in the previous game, the player can choose one of three characters to fill each slot, with similar roles in the party, but the choice of characters in this game has a much greater effect on the plot, each having their own arc through the story and many scenes either unique to one or different for each party (including elements which depend on more than one person). Their outlooks are also far less similar than one would expect, despite leading them to the same decisions at most points.

Provides Examples Of:

Apocalyptic Log: You find one right near the end. So did the villains, but they're too impatient to translate it all. It's anybody's guess whether reading its warning would have changed their course though.

Benevolent Alien Invasion: Played with. The Rakari do seem genuinely invested in humanity's well-being, as they ultimately spared it in the inital invasion, even though they had every good reason to annihilate it. However, they're also Well Intentioned Extremists who frequently brainwash people "for their own good" and to maintain a Medieval Stasis. Ultimately, the Central Theme of the narrative revolves around whether or not their benevolent dictatorship model is really worth it, though the narrative tries to avoid overtly picking a side.

Berserk Button: Don't criticize (or patronize) Grace for her part in the Amaran war. You will regret it.

BGM Override: During chapter 5, the area music plays during all battles except the boss.

Big Damn Heroes: Clay 13, twice (though it's not until after the second time that you actually find out who he is).

Possibly justified; Batiste is slowly losing power throughout the fight due to being disconnected from the World Eye. By the time he gets down to his final form, he probably only has enough energy left for the Laser Blade.

Cursed with Awesome: Ionae eventually comes to view herself as having this. When she's given the chance to go back she kills the messenger to make sure that nobody else can try to bring her back again. However, even (or perhaps especially) after that she is acutely aware of the downsides of being a relatively-powerless human.

Dark and Troubled Past: Kaltos got involved in some very illegal stuff and didn't realize what he was doing until his wife left him. Charlotte ran away from home after "winning" a suspicious amount of money off her boss in a card game, and even one of the fellow party members casually implies that he suspects her of being a thief. Enshadu can't even guess at what he must've done in the past, but it was clearly pretty gruesome.

Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Ick Thelloth. Huge, hideous demon who can manipulate and break minds and who has been mutating and evolving the wildlife nearby towards things which could dig him out of his prison, likely for hundreds of years. Goes down hard.

Expy: The hippy, peace-and-love cult making a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Edges look identical to the evil cult from The Spirit Engine 1. Naturally, everybody and his brother assumes they're evil. If only they could be so lucky.

Fantastic Racism: Two-sided example. Yaegera and Lereftain both think the other country is full of wretched barbarians.

Fantasy Gun Control: Actually averted. The technology level seems to be around the 13th to 14th century — guns are still fairly recent inventions, and swordsmen are still around. This is actually rather problematic for knights, as the skills that they spent their lives training for are quickly becoming useless due to the advent of gunpowder.

Also Batiste's final form. Terrible armor, but can dish out upwards of 2000 damage per attack.

Guest-Star Party Member: At several points (including the final boss) someone with a gun hangs around behind you to provide extra firepower. They're never as strong as the actual party members, but the extra firepower is free, so who's complaining?

You'd be justified in complaining when Ferwin marries Marie and she tags along for an entire chapter. Many of the enemies in this area have tricky mechanics- Opal Swarms go invisible every time they get hit, and Forest Mimics become immune to a given damage type after taking a certain amount of it. Because your Guest-Star Party Member is not under your control, she will periodically attack at an inopportune time and cause a much more powerful attack to be completely wasted. And Ferwin has the condition 'lovestruck' for the duration, which gives a number of negative status effects.

Human Popsicle: In an interesting variation, most of the population of the world underwent this to wait out a disaster, except a few who stayed awake for maintenance. Sadly, the weapons used to fight the Rakari killed an awful lot of them when the controller was driven insane... twice.

Load-Bearing Boss: The final boss. Though to be fair he was wrecking the place up pretty bad before you even arrived, and just got worse once he started fighting you. It's a wonder the ceiling held long enough to finish your fight.

Magic from Technology and/or Magitek: The game turns more sci-fi the closer you get to the end. However, not all the setting's magic has any relation to technology (such as the skills of the party members themselves).

Marathon Boss: The Bonus Boss, Urtat Underval. He's a Stone Wall, and heals himself when low on health. Defeating him is extremely difficult and often takes quite a while.

Also Count Cristoff. His health actually decreases throughout the fight, but every attack he makes drains a sizable portion of his target's health, so if you damage him, he can just drain it back. It gets even worse once he gets low on health and uses an attack that makes him disappear for a long time and regenerate about 2000 Hit Points. Needless to say, the battle can drag on for quite a while.

Although effective use of the brace skill allows you to reduce the damage of his attacks, and coincidentally the strength of his healing, to such pathetic levels that his fight becomes an extremely short cakewalk.

The king, though, is Ick Thelloth. He doesn't have any way of healing himself except for some token extremely slow regeneration, but he reflects a percentage of all damage he receives back onto one of your party members, in a form that ignores armor and cannot be dodged or resisted. So if you try to kill him too fast you die, and just hitting him at all usually requires waiting for him to randomly select the party member you can most easily heal for his ability, launching one or two solid attacks, and healing up, by which time your window of opportunity to attack has likely closed. And he has a lot of health, and some devastating active attacks.

Mind Rape: The Rakari used this as a weapon during their war against humanity, and may or may not still do so when necessary for security (though the end of Enshadu's story implies that their mind control is refined enough that they probably don't have to). This is also Ick Thelloth's modus operandi.

Mirror Match: The Imagination battle if you have a party of Ionae, Pyan Pau, and Denever. (Doubly so for Ionae and Enshadu, who actually fight themselves)

Money Spider: Averted — there's actually a finite amount of credits in the game, in addition to a limited number of slots for selling things, forcing you to be very careful with your purchases.

Mood Whiplash: Chapter 4. You've gone to bright, happy, Porto Vale, with cheery music, a festival, and an uplifting mood! Things might be making a turn for the better for once! ...And then we get mood whiplash of the other kind once chapter 5 rolls around and we get a Fantastic Nuke combined with Zombie Apocalypse.

Morality Kitchen Sink: Although the good guys are obviously good guys and some of the bad guys are obviously bad guys, by the time you reach the end and have the full story it's entirely unclear whether the Rakari or the the Keepers of Order are good, evil, or neutral, and the answer to both questions may not be the same. And if you do think they're evil, that gives the "real" villains of the story quite a bit of sympathy points.

And Played for Drama yet again in a specific instance: During Grace's Hannibal Lecture in chapter 8, her imagination is simply called "Unknown Soldier" to emphasize how she tried not to think about how the soldiers she mowed down were actual people. The purposeful contrast with other Red Shirts having names is rather chilling.

Now What?: The ending leaves it intentionally unclear whether any of the Rakari even survived, rather less if they are still going to be in charge of the government. The status quo is definitely broken, but it'll be a while before any of the characters present for the finale or the final scene know just how broken, and nobody has a clue yet what it'll be replaced with.

Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Compared to the other two choices for his party member slot, Mericious is actually a pretty nice guy and a paragon of virtue. He still openly criticizes every decision by just about everybody in the world except himself and cleanly states he's "not a people person" more than once.

Obvious Rule Patch: It's not made obvious anywhere, but the author has stated that Ick Thelloth deals a third less retaliation damage to a three musketeer party... because even with that bit of mercy they're the least suited party in the game for that battle.

Properly Paranoid: Once you finally reach the Institute, one of the professors is extremely paranoid and distrusting of you. The one that greets you tells him to stop worrying. Later, a group of Keepers arrive, and the same scenario plays out...except that it ends with the keepers killing both professors and gassing the facility.

Psychic Powers: The Rakari can read and rewrite humans' minds, though the mind-reading power doesn't seem to be always on. Ick Thelloth's got mind-attacking powers too, but seemingly much less refined.

Religion of Evil: Subverted with the Keepers. They have all the trappings of one (and they certainly don't do themselves any favors), but it turns out that, until the very end, they're literally the only ones actually opposing the Big Bad, whereas everyone else is playing right into his hands.

This is also deconstructed, amazingly. In the final chapter, while he raises his gun to shoot Isabelle, he begins a long-winded speech about how what he's about to do is for the greater good and is a necessary evil. Before he finishes, he is stabbed In the Back by one of Batiste's bodyguards.

Stone Wall: Priests, if you use the right tactics — chi protects them from physical damage and constantly regenerates, aurora protects them from magical damage, and the Chosen skill greatly increases resistance to ethereal. If you combine these attributes, they become nigh untouchable.

Also Urtat Underval. His defenses are massive, and he can also heal himself while at low health, which can make the fight drag out for quite a while.

Well-Intentioned Extremist: Batiste, who intends to cause huge amount of destruction to free humanity from their Rakari overlords.. Whether the Rakari and/or the Keepers of Order are this is intentionally left for the player to decide for themselves, but it's clear that even if they are, he went a bit overboard against them.

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